Torquing!

I don't own the legal rights to this game, just the bragging rights. Of the five FunOrb minigames I developed at Jagex, Torquing! is my favourite.

Gameplay

You control a hamster who, for no obvious reason, races around courses collecting sunflower seeds and trying to make it to the end before the hard time limit.

The actual mechanism of control is quite indirect. The cursor keys apply angular acceleration to the hamster; this builds up angular velocity, which is converted into linear velocity by friction with the surface. This makes for a hard learning curve but the potential to do clever tricks by changing your angular velocity in mid-air, so the game appeals more to the hard-core player.

If you have OCD you may be best advised to avoid this game, because some of the achievements are completely insane.

Historical and technical notes

The original brief was to create a game like Marble Madness, although anyone who's played MM may struggle to see the influence.

The physics engine uses RK4 and quaternions. Collision resolution uses the complementarity approach of Giang, Bradshaw, and O'Sullivan (2003). Back in the day the rendering was entirely done in software, although it may now have been updated to use OpenGL.

Although the official credits don't include him, Thomas D made significant contributions to level design.

Congrats on the game. Physics is cool and graphics are impressive for software rendering. There are jaggies visible but that's the trade-off to get it running reliably in software i guess.The game seems quite similar to kevglass's tilt game: http://old.cokeandcode.com/tilt2000/

That's pretty sweet to get a contract with jagex. What was it like working with them?

I don't really like the controls (maybe it's me being really bad at it). I think that a hamster wouldn't be smiling if it plunged to it's doom. I also think it is very confusing. And why do you need an account when all you want to do is play it?

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